Behold Your God, Isaiah 40:12-31

1. Read Isaiah 40:28-31. What comes to mind when you think of having to wait for something? What does it mean here to wait for the Lord?
2. What changes about the way you wait for the Lord when you see and dwell on a glimpse his greatness, like in v. 28?
3. In what ways are you in need of strength right now? And what are you hoping for?
4. Reflect back on times when you felt as if you were soaring spiritually or running with a burst of energy or simply putting one foot in front of the other and walking towards God. If you're going through a difficult time, what are some key differences between then and now? When have you had to wait the longest on the Lord? What are some ways he's come through for you?
5. Where have you turned for comfort or validation or your sense of identity other than God in difficult times? What idols may be in your life now that are preventing you from waiting fully on him?

Practice: Cup your hand and imagine what can fit in it. Name some things that would fit there in your physical hand. Then imagine the vast life and immense power of the ocean fitting into it. Picture the chaos of the seas if you were to zoom into it. Imagine the power of the one who can tame it with a word. Take as long as you'd like to explore this in your own imagination. Then wait for the Lord. The King enthroned in the heavens is the same one close enough in the air to touch and even making his dwelling inside of us. Imagine yourself now in the palm of his loving hand. Ask what he wants for your life in this season and wait.

Today we’re looking at Isaiah 40 and concluding this series. I have personally really needed this passage. God predicts these very high temperatures, these desert-like experiences Israel will go through in exile.

I’m not sure there’s a better way to describe hellish circumstances than exile. You feel uprooted from anything significant. You can’t make sense of your past, present, or future. You feel uprooted and away from God. They’re in Babylon looking at Jerusalem where God was, and they feel lost.

There are life circumstances and some of them are because of our own sin. God is the one sending them into exile.

When you get to Isaiah 40, the people are beat down with the reality of what is coming. God’s not giving up on them and says they can be renewed.

This is God’s divine therapy, coming alongside people in the worst circumstances.

The reason most of us don’t want therapy is because most of us don’t want to hear the truth about ourselves. As part of this therapy, God says I need you to do two things. You need to listen to these voices I’m sending. He’s promised to keep his word and carry us. The second thing is that God wants us to look. He wants us to look and listen. God says he’s coming in the voices, and now he wants us to see who is coming.

You’re going to have to hear hard things, but you’re also going to have to reflect and think. We’re going to see that the cosmos is terrifying, the history is terrifying. How does God operate in a terrifying reality? Israel has nations subjugating them. The universe sometimes feels against you.

God is about to tell us that these powerful forces are nothing to him. But there will be times you feel as if they are overwhelming and overpowering. But they are not ultimate reality.

After God says to look at him, this is what he wants us to see. He has some rhetorical questions to ask us to think. A good counselor asks good questions.

Let’s start where he starts. The writer is going to ask us to be thoughtful. He wants us to know, think, and understand. If you follow God, you’ll have to do some thinking. It’s hard to listen when you’re in a dark place and it’s hard to be thoughtful. You don’t necessarily think rationally.

A. W. Tozer says in Knowledge of the Holy that whatever comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The weight of God is more crushing than all the woes piled together. God is more weighty than all of it.

God measures things, but he can’t be measured. He’s not part of creation. He’s outside of creation and beyond it. Don’t confuse God with the way the world works. He’s not made of the same stuff.

Whatever you learn from this, material and physical things are not ultimate. God is ultimate. He determines and sustains all reality.

Sometimes we tend to think the world is too much for God. But he’s very detailed, very accurate. He has it down to a science. He’s never even a little off.

We’ve been inundated recently with the horrors and power of the ocean. But God has the oceans in the palm of his hand. Put the palm of your hand out and see what you can hold. You can’t get much in there.

The Pacific Ocean has millions of cubic miles and quintillions of gallons. But God can put that in his hand. This is part of the therapy. Do you know who you’re dealing with?

He marks off the heavens and the galaxies and all reality with the span of his hand.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen there’s something fundamentally wrong with our conception of the universe. They measure the rate of the universe expanding and realizing they’re coming up with different measurements. Science calls that a crisis. What we think about dark energy and gravity changes. Our understanding of physics is at stake.

You have these mind-boggling realities, yet God manages the universe with his hands. He measures the dust and the mountains with a scale. He’s managing with one hand.

But God can’t be measured (v. 13). He can’t be counseled (v. 14). He doesn’t need counsel like we do. Who taught him the paths of justice? Nobody. He understands what’s going on fully.

Tozer says, “Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms.” He says, “To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for "where" has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both.”

It’s not just the cosmos that God wants us to reflect on. We should see everything else in light of how we see God.

“Nations” is just a collective term for everything we as humans can do. As soon as you realize how big God is, you realize how small everything else is.

Having national allies was the only way you could survive back in the day. Babylon was the nation who held the power then. It’s true in our day in different ways. We have so many countries with nuclear power that we’re all scared to do anything. We met with China this week and the world was sitting on the edge of its seat. Who is our ally and who isn’t?

Who holds the power? God is saying they’re a drop in the bucket and dust on the scales. He’s unaffected by those things. They’re inconsequential. They don’t tip the scale. If you put a particle of dust on the scale it’s unnoticeable.

Every nation has something they produce they could boast about. Lebanon built trees you would use for building. He says in v. 16 that they don’t even have enough trees for fuel of sacrifice.

Something I’ve done a couple of times this week is just cup my hand and realize how little we know or have and just how big God is and what he’s capable of. We’re dependent beings.

As you go into the next paragraph, you get invited to compare God to other things. When God shrinks in your mind and other things get bigger, you’ll look for something else to come through for you.

What you get in vv. 18-28 is God saying these idols aren’t big enough to help you at all. They’re made of the stuff that God created. Don’t let anything else lure you away. Don’t define yourself by anything else.

Sometimes we see that God is really big, but it doesn’t feel like God is focused on me. You have to question your questions. Question your doubts. When you don’t feel like God is big enough, you go back to Isaiah and see what kind of God you have.

Every 7 days, we come back together to remind each other who we’re dealing with. God is not diminished in any way by what is happening in the world. We’re gaining resources all the time so we don’t feel diminished. God is never under the gun or out of resources.

Even though God is big and never faints, we’re down here gagging. That’s all wonderful that God is all-powerful, but what good is it if that God doesn’t care? Yet he gives power to the faint and increases strength. Even the best among us, the young and strong ones run out of energy. God knows you don’t have it in you to manage whatever it is you have to manage.

It’s a long way to get to this verse. The weightiest verse in the whole text is “wait.”

I was in high school reading this text and breaking up with a girl. I thought it was the end of the world. I hate the word “wait.” It’s a very dense word. It’s multi-faceted. It’s a synonym for trust, but it’s more than that. The word “wait” is a horrible word to hear. It’s a temporal word that makes us hear “slow” and “helpless.” But it can’t mean that when you hear it. God is saying it’ll make you end up flying and running and walking. Waiting doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. We can’t stand the idea of not progressing.

Somehow, when you feel like you can’t move at all, God gives you the ability to move. But you have to move towards him.

If we took the word wait and tried to understand it, we have to relate to him in a way that moves toward something that he’s promised.

We have not said in our hearts that God exists until we trust him. You can mentally believe in God without trusting him.

I want to give you a couple of things that trust is. God is able to produce in me a longing for hope. I don’t want to get up and move unless I have something to move towards.

In Psalm 137, the Jews are in exile and weeping every day to come back from exile. They have to keep the longing alive. That’s what “waiters” do. They settle in knowing that God has something on the other side.

You can go through hell with God or you can go through hell without God. What do you want to do?

You can’t turn to idols in the dark moments. Don’t try to find something else that’s going to satisfy your soul. Trust in God and depend on him.

God says if you do that and have that confidence, he can help you fly, run, walk.

I’ve tried to figure out what God meant by these images. When you’re flying, you see at 30,000 feet. Sometimes God helps you move a whole lot faster towards things and it’s all clear. But I fly very little. I’ve had moments of flying, but a lot more running. It’s effort and it’s grueling. You’re gaining fast ground.

In my life, I’ve had temporary bursts where you’re running in your spiritual life. They’re not easy, but they feel good.

Then it goes to walking. Why do we go from flying and end up walking? Scholars are not sure what to make of that anticlimactic picture. But you don’t soar a lot. You run some, but you won’t run forever. But you’ll do a lot of walking. Sometimes he’ll get you past that thing fast, sometimes it’s a grueling run, but sometimes you just need to wake up and put one foot in front of the other.

But the whole point of the text is that you don’t do any of it without God. You’ll pass out. Even the best and most youthful runner among you will get tired.

Walking feels slow and useless. It’s good for you, but it doesn’t feel like you’re moving fast. It’s a slow and steady move. Don’t try to get there faster than he’s bringing you. He knows what you need.

God is essentially saying, just trust me. Don’t turn to other nations or idols besides me. You have something to move toward, and I’ll keep you moving.

God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and our ways are not his ways.

Isaiah 53 comes in this section where it says Jesus would be crushed for us. He felt judgment. He was in exile. Yet, it was the will of the Lord to crush him.

I don’t know why you’re being crushed right now, but God is big enough to help you through it. God knows what he is doing when he puts you in a situation that feels crushing. You have hope.